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There’s only one REAL way to know if you know how to do something, and that’s if you’ve actually use that skill and you’ve done it consistently well. Some people think that just because they’ve read a dozen blog articles or watched a dozen training videos on YouTube, they become “experts” at something (like YouTube “martial arts experts” on internet forums). That’s not always the case as nothing beats actual experience.
Are there skills that you really want to learn, like business, investing, writing, graphic design, engineering, or something else? After learning from qualified experts, here are some tips to make sure that you really learn how to do it.
How to REALLY Learn a New Skill
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Know how good (or bad) you REALLY are
Like a lot of people, I’ve watched a lot of movies where, at a certain point, disaster happens and the heroes save their lover, friends, or family. Because I’ve seen how they do it, I imagine myself being able to do all those things as well.
Well, I only discovered how much I don’t know when I joined a two-day first aid and basic life support (BLS) training (April 14-15, 2018). The instructors were search and rescue and disaster relief experts with over 13 years of experience and they taught us a several things that we should do whenever there is a serious emergency like how to assess victims’ condition, bandaging, splints, moving patients, CPR, and more. At the end of training, they tested us with a simulated disaster with several “victims” (actors) that need rescue and transport. Even though it was an “easy” simulation, it was still quite difficult. We’ve had time to talk and plan, yet we still had difficulty assigning people to transport patients. I personally had trouble with patient assessment, SAMPLE history and taking vital signs. I also made several mistakes on CPR, and I almost tried to transport an unconscious (with a then-unknown spinal injury) “victim”.
Thankfully, I hesitated on that last one. Rescuing people looked a lot easier in the movies.
There are four levels of competence. Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence, and we all start at unconscious incompetence. We’re all bad at something when we start but we don’t know we’re bad at it (unconscious incompetence). It’s like how when I first started driving and I wasn’t that good at it my 12 year old cousin said HE should drive because he thinks he can do it better even though he never had driving lessons at all. We all start that way and it’s only after the first training that we begin to know how bad we are at it (conscious incompetence). After practice we get decent if we concentrate (conscious competence), and later on we get so good that we can do it automatically, like a taxi driver driving a car (unconscious competence).
Don’t forget this one. No matter how much our pride would tell us otherwise, we ALL start at unconscious incompetence. It’s only when we start learning and DOING something that we understand how good OR BAD we actually are. Actual experience will beat ignorance.
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Use what you learned
There’s a saying, “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.” Try watching some boxing or MMA fights or some martial arts movies and imagine yourself doing those punches and kicks. If you haven’t joined a martial arts club before, you’d think you can do them easily right? As kids or as people who’ve never thrown a punch, we all thought that we can punch and kick almost as fast and as hard as the movie characters and pro fighters we watched.
It’s only on the first day that we actually JOIN a martial arts training class, the first time we try punching and kicking a bag, and the first time we actually SPAR with somebody that we’ll quickly realize how bad we really are. We were first at the “unconscious incompetence” stage where we think we can do it but we really can’t, and now we’ve moved to the “conscious incompetence” stage where we REALIZED that we’re not as good as we thought.
Like I said before, it’s only when we’ve started actually DOING something that we begin to understand it. If there’s a skill we want to learn, we have to actually do it. We want to learn how to invest in stocks? It’s one thing to read an investing book, it’s another to actually look at hundreds of stock graphs and interpret company information to see if the company’s stock is worth investing in.
Book knowledge alone can’t beat actual experience.
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CONTINUE Practicing
It’s said that if you learned something new, you need to practice it again within the next 24 hours if you want to improve your chances on remembering how to do it. If you don’t practice, you will forget how to do it as the days, weeks, and months pass. Think about it. If you’ve joined a boy/girl scout back in grade school, you probably learned to tie bowline knots or clove hitches on trees. Can you still do them now? You probably can’t unless you review and practice them constantly.
If you want to learn something and you don’t want to eventually forget it, you WILL need to continue practicing. This is why, in the outdoor organization that I joined which organized the first aid and BLS training, they require members to take the courses every year (and practice knot tying at home—in fact, I practiced some knots as I wrote this article).
Nothing beats experiencing how to do something… except experience gained from long term practice. One way to know if you’re good at something is if you’ve done it well most of the time for a long time.
How to become GREAT
The three tips I mentioned before are the main steps at learning a new skill, and doing number three will likely help you get good at it. There is still one more thing that you should learn if you want to be GREAT.
“Kaizen.” It’s a Japanese term that means “never ending improvement.”
It’s usually used for businesses, but you can use it on just about any skill, activity, or any part of your personal life. If you want to be one of the best at a certain skill or sport, you need to consciously continue trying to improve yourself at it. Read and learn what experts do and what they’ve recently discovered, try to use them yourself, and then look for ways on how to improve your own performance. Don’t forget, you can always grow and get better.
Nothing beats experience? Well using other people’s knowledge and accumulated experience to improve your own might, especially if you learn to use them right.
Aside from this blog, here’s another example of how I use kaizen. I used to be content with “anime style” drawings until I started drawing seriously. When I started drawing for my art stream, I realized that my art was FAR from what professionals can do, and I needed to improve. Practicing the same old anime style art alone won’t make me better, and I needed to learn a lot of new techniques. Now I’m trying to learn things like composition, value control, how to compose focal points, more detailed musculature and anatomy, and more. Thanks to that, I’ve made some progress, but it’s obvious that I still have a lot to learn if I want to draw professionally.
I’ve ALSO needed to learn how to market my artwork using social media like Instagram and Twitter in order to get supporters and Patrons. Kaizen is not just learning things that can improve your skill. It’s also about learning things that can supplement those skills, and more.
Time for YOU to use the lesson!
What kind of skills do you want to learn?
Do you want to learn how to play the electric guitar? Buy one, read and watch online tutorials or learn from a qualified instructor, and then practice on your new guitar every day. After practicing the basics, learn some songs and try playing those. Play more and more songs until you get better, and never stop practicing. After that, keep improving by learning different techniques like fast ascending and descending licks, tapping licks, tremolo/”trem” picking, “whammy bar” techniques, and more and then continue practicing those.
Do you want to learn how to play chess? Read the rules and watch tutorial videos. Download a chess app for your smartphone or computer to practice. Play against real people. Keep improving by reading books about them. Improve by watching world champion chess players’ matches and study how they move. Think about WHY they made the moves they did. After that, continue practicing against other people some more and try to use the new things you’ve learned. (This is also what I do since I’m trying to learn shogi.)
Do you want to learn how to invest in rental properties? Read books about it to learn the basics, talk to some real estate agents who can help you, and then take out loans to actually buy some property and fix it up for rental. After you established one property, go and buy another, and another, and another. Continue improving by building bigger and bigger projects and apartments, and more.
Never forget this: If you want to learn something, you must learn the basics, do it for real, keep practicing, and always look for ways on how to improve. If you don’t, all the time and effort you spent learning will just be wasted. People don’t pay you for what you know, after all. They pay you for what you DO.